The scientist came to Sumy with Marius Janukonis, the Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Republic of Lithuania in Ukraine.

“It is our first visit to Sumy. I am glad to see that you have a modern university with the progressive thinking and approach and a desire to cooperate with foreign universities”, – said Marius Janukonis. – We came to talk about international relations, including information security. The Lithuanian Embassy in Ukraine has been the contact point of NATO for the last three years. We pay great attention to communication with young people, and today the lecturer of the Vilnius University Dr. Neriius Malyukavičius came with us. You know that Lithuania supports Ukraine very much. Unfortunately, we are united not just because of common history, European interests (today the Eastern Partnership Summit is being held, where our presidents sign peace agreements and discuss further steps of Ukraine on its way to the EU), but also common threats. The main one is aggressive policy of Russia. It is going not only about military threat, but also about hybrid aggression against the whole Western civilization. Of course, we live in the era of Google and Facebook and it is difficult to protect ourselves from different streams of information. We do not have time to analyze information, we perceive everything very quickly. Consequently, the information war is one of the main instruments aimed from the Russian side to destroy. Many fake news and other informational reasons are created”.

Before the lecture “Information threats in the modern world”, Dr. Nerijus Malyukevičius, the lecturer at the University of Vilnius, offered to watch a documentary film of Lithuanian filmmakers M. Starkus and J. Bonis “War 2020: Russian Information Aggression”.

“You do not have to think that the information aggression, that Ukraine is experiencing now, is something new, which we have not felt before or are not feeling in the Baltic States now. I believe that we can resist it just acting together, because Russia's policy is to achieve its goals due to the hybrid strategy aimed at one after another country. We need new information coalitions”, – said Nerijus Malyukevičius.

The basic idea of the lecture is that history teaches us that we do not learn anything from the history. The expert noted: “What is happening today in Ukraine, in the Baltic states, is a part of the strategy of the ideological struggle that was conducted by the Soviet Union”. The information war has being existed for years, and recently there have got just new technologies. It is necessary to understand the strategy of conducting the hybrid confrontation, which has been already registered in the history.

Karina Khachatarian

(translated by Yuliya Bondarenko)